Compared to several Shadowrun campaigns I've been in, Dark Heresy makes Inquisitors look nice. Hand-wringing pussies would hate those games, though. Our yakuza hit team would make them cry.

Quote from: AnthonyRoberson;474086I will admit to having a certain morbid fascination with the universe of the 41st Millenium. But isn't playing an agent of the Inquisition the sci-fi equivalent of playing a jew hunter for the gestapo? Is it wrong bad fun?

Wow.

 No, really wow.

The OP here may have a hell of a point.

Always been annoyed with that universe - that analogy or metaphor may be why. (Okay annoyed as in dislike bordering on hate at times or disgust.)

Again there are no "Good Guys" in that universe.


- Ed C.

Quote from: danbuter;474149Compared to several Shadowrun campaigns I've been in, Dark Heresy makes Inquisitors look nice. Hand-wringing pussies would hate those games, though. Our yakuza hit team would make them cry.

Today I am making a hat-trick of agreeing with people I normally do not.

My Shadowrun PC (my own grandson, Jack Liberty Jr.) was a psychopathic terrorist organ-legger and cop-killer jacked up on stimulants whose most positive relationships were with a kid he was teaching to cook meth, a cannibal ghoul butcher, and his former cell-mate, a Triad fixer, who he ended up kidnapping as part of a cockamamie scheme. He sold out every friend he ever had, killed the innocent remorselessly when he didn't exploit them, and nearly sold a kid to some ghouls for burger meat before the whole Shadowrunning thing went sour.

In Dark Heresy, a PC of mine once killed 10 million people by blowing up a nuclear power plant next to the only source of potable water on a moon after he'd been ordered to kill the operators of the spaceport the nuclear power plant was atop. But they weren't characters, just a statistic.

Quote from: AnthonyRoberson;474147What does having 'agency' mean?

Agency means you can make and act on meaningful choices.

Quote from: Ian Warner;474100I don't think it's misery toruism so much as FUCKING METAL!

It is FUCKING METAL!!

Quote from: Koltar;474150Wow.

 No, really wow.

The OP here may have a hell of a point.

Always been annoyed with that universe - that analogy or metaphor may be why. (Okay annoyed as in dislike bordering on hate at times or disgust.)

Again there are no "Good Guys" in that universe.


- Ed C.

You just caught the ball, dude.

Quote from: Koltar;474150Wow.

 No, really wow.

The OP here may have a hell of a point.

Always been annoyed with that universe - that analogy or metaphor may be why. (Okay annoyed as in dislike bordering on hate at times or disgust.)

Again there are no "Good Guys" in that universe.


- Ed C.

Just as much as there are no "Good Guys" in real life.

Everyone has their own agenda, and for a great many, humanity is just an troublesome bug meant to be squashed and moved on from.

Really, what do you expect, in a universe when a daemon can pop out of someone's head, and kill a small city on it's own?

The other thing to consider is that your characters in DH aren't Inquisitors, they are the agents of Inquisitors, and thus not possessed of that same unbridled authority.

I sort of get confused by some accounts of the game I see, because it seems as if the actual Inquisitor is often relegated to a spineless puppet that the PCs can just order to do whatever they like.  

Which seems like a shitty way to GM it to me, though it is a common method for dealing with hierarchy in gaming groups.

Quote from: J Arcane;474162The other thing to consider is that your characters in DH aren't Inquisitors, they are the agents of Inquisitors, and thus not possessed of that same unbridled authority.

I sort of get confused by some accounts of the game I see, because it seems as if the actual Inquisitor is often relegated to a spineless puppet that the PCs can just order to do whatever they like.  

Which seems like a shitty way to GM it to me, though it is a common method for dealing with hierarchy in gaming groups.

In the games I've played, the Inquisitor was usually on another world and would tell us to go do his dirty work. Often, help was far away and bad guys might think there was an advantage to killing us before we got a message out. We always knew he was a bastard and he set us up to die twice: still, he was the boss man. He was such a bastard and we were so fucked by back story it was lucky he would take us back after we survived. After a year or two of playing we finally got rank and proved the bastard was a heretic.

It took a lot of getting shit on to get that far though.

I think FFG really missed the boat with Dark Heresy by not having it be about full Inquisitors and their direct retinue. They have tried to correct this with Ascension, but the game would have been much better off if the base set was about real Inquisitors, IMO.

Quote from: J Arcane;474162I sort of get confused by some accounts of the game I see, because it seems as if the actual Inquisitor is often relegated to a spineless puppet that the PCs can just order to do whatever they like.

...that seems like a sure-fired way to get sent on a spectactularly bad suicide mission, to me.

This is the dude that can order "Extermitus" on an entire planet. Your team, is a warm-up for the group below it, or an "easy day" for his Alpha group of Acolytes...

Quote from: Novastar;474161Just as much as there are no "Good Guys" in real life.

Everyone has their own agenda, and for a great many, humanity is just an troublesome b....diipity-doo blah-blah bullshit.....

And You're WRONG.

 There are LOTS of Good Guys in Real Life!!

They're known as Police officers, Firefighters, paramedics, Doctors, Nurses....various first-responders and emergency workers.

Also the men and women in the military are quite often the GOOD GUYS in all sorts of situation.

Also, Red Cross volunteers, Salvation Army workers...and oh yeah bodyguardsw at Plannened Parenthood clinics that escort women in past angry protestors......folks who join the Guardian Angels or similiar neighborhood watch groups in their home towns....


- Ed C.

Quote from: danbuter;474166I think FFG really missed the boat with Dark Heresy by not having it be about full Inquisitors and their direct retinue. They have tried to correct this with Ascension, but the game would have been much better off if the base set was about real Inquisitors, IMO.

I don't think full Inquisitors would be as fun. Being on the very bottom of the Inquisition food chain with pretty much no back up is a lot of fun and encourages creativity.

Having said that I did make it about the Inquisitor and Retinue in my spoof but that world has it's own rules which make no sense.

The whole thing to remember about the 40K universe is that it was written by Brits.

It's really a bit of a silly heavy metal piss take. Gross gallows humour is where it's coming from. Or where it was originally - I don't know the rpg, so FFG probabaly changed some things and treated the setting more seriously than it deserved.

As originally written the setting was a splatter movie where any PCs would be arseholes and you probably cheered when you finally fucked up and got what you deserved. If you can't see the appeal in that (and it doesn't work for me at all) then you weren't going to like it.

As I say, I don't know the current game, so I'm probably talking out of my arse as regards the rpg. But above was, I believe, the original theme of that setting.

Quote from: AnthonyRoberson;474086I will admit to having a certain morbid fascination with the universe of the 41st Millenium. But isn't playing an agent of the Inquisition the sci-fi equivalent of playing a jew hunter for the gestapo?

Well, taken with a straight face, Warhammer40k is definitely Nazis: The RPG, down to the flimsy justifications of "men are forced to choose the lesser evil, to serve the greater good" and "its not like they are abusing innocents for no reason", which are right out of the SS songbook, and someone who could quote Goebbels or Heydrich chapter and verse could find the exact equivalents where they admit they are doing terrible things on the Ostfront because they have to. Chaos is a literal Evil for the Warhammer universe, and an existential threat to humankind. Which, after all, is not all that different from the danger The Jews were supposed to represent for the Third Reich et al. (These are also standard excuses of the RIFTS Coalition States of America, who are similar nazi stand-ins, and also fan favourites.) Simultaneously, Wh40k is also a satire of these attitudes, and may make for a great game if you run it like Gruntfuttock suggested.

Of course, most fans of the setting, who are after all 14 years old boys or the equivalent, miss both the downright nasty themes and the satire.

Quote from: AnthonyRoberson;474086Is it wrong bad fun?

It is on the level of ironically dressing up as an SS officer for a costume party. It is in bad taste, but not socially dangerous. And let's admit it, those are some snappy uniforms.

This thread is now about:

Are the Jews represented by Chaos or the Orkz, and who represent the Soviet Union in WH40K?